However, source B promotes a different idea. With the interview taking place in 1988, it is quite a long time after the war. The teacher being interviewed will have had quite a bit of time to put things in perspective in regards to the bigger picture, and will have had the chance to decide if this was the best option. Being a teacher, she will undoubtedly know the children fairly well, and so will have a good measure on the children’s emotions. The fact that the children are described as “too afraid to talk” shows that at this stage, evacuation was not a success in regards to the children’s happiness. The teacher says that “we hadn’t the slightest idea where we were going” and it makes the situation sound almost hopeless, going into the unknown but having no choice if you wish to stay alive.
Source C is a difficult source to trust. Although based on real life, it is still a novel and therefore fiction. Certain parts will be exaggerated or changed for better reading. A novel cannot be used for accurate sources, seeing as how it was not made for telling history, rather it was made as something fiction to give a good read. However, it does give a small view on what it was like in the countryside. In this source it is clear that the children are safe in the countryside, and the fact that they are “giggling” with each other shows that it can’t have been that bad. So according to the source, evacuation was a success in both aspects, but it is still inaccurate. It was written in 1973, after the war, and only shows what happened to two of the children, so we cannot get a good view of the majority.
Source D can be interpreted in two ways. In one aspect, it can be interpreted as though evacuation is a success that more children want to be evacuated and therefore more parents are needed. It can also be interpreted as government propaganda that is trying to convince people to evacuate their children. It was issued in 1940, shortly after evacuation had started, and was a government advertisement that shows all the typical signs of propaganda. It shows two happy children, hugging and ‘protecting’ each other, the sharp contrast of the ‘safe’ countryside and the ‘dangerous’ city. Just before the blitz in May/June 1940 people had brought their children home from the countryside, believing there to be no threat. In other words, evacuation was a failure and this source is government propaganda trying to get people to send their children away again.
Source E again shows evacuation in a bad light. Throughout the whole article, the parent of a small boy is maintaining the fact that he doesn’t want his child to be evacuated. The blitz had just started in France at this time, and people now knew what to expect. There was a great possibility of death, but people would rather spend their last days with their family rather than sending their children away and leaving them as orphans with no where to go after the war had ended. The source shows a reverse stereotype from that of source C, and made me realise that people form the towns knew nothing about people form the countryside, and vice versa. Is it so difficult to think that people would want to keep their children close by rather than send them somewhere that they know nothing about an believe is worse than where they are.
The final source, source F, does not give much of a view on evacuation, as in the end the children are not evacuated. There is also the fact that it is a film, it was made after the war, and was made for entertainment. It is form the point of view of a young boy who probably only remembered a few important events from when he was little, and the rest is fabricated to make people want to watch the film and to over exaggerate the ‘horrors of war’. All that we have gained is that evacuation did seem to be popular, or at least at the time there were lots of people at the station. That fact that you had to apply for evacuation implies that a lot of people wanted to do it and that there was some sort of list or sorting system. However the fact that in the end the children stayed at home only supports what was said in source E, people wanted their children with them at home.
While evacuation did save lives, it was not a “great success”. Most people did not want to evacuate their children and only did it as a last resort or in some cases when they couldn’t afford to keep their children at home. It seems that there was a mixture of success and failure, particularly in regards to the children’s happiness. This was to be expected as it is obvious that children were treated better in some places, and worse in others. Better measures should have been made to explain fully what was happening, and more importantly where parents were sending their children. If this had been done the perhaps evacuation would have been more of a success. But as it was, I do not think evacuation was a great success, the statement is false.
